Reflection Two in a Seven-Part Series on Encountering Transcendence in the Present Moment
After the transcendent moment of standing on sacred ancestral ground in Sitka, I am barely able to contain the buzz I’m feeling this morning in Juneau Alaska. As I look out over the water from my stateroom balcony, still wrapped in the hush of early morning, I am greeted by an uncommon sight. Before me stand tall wooden carvings—majestic, weather-worn, and profoundly dignified. Totem poles, rising from the land like ancient sentinels, welcoming my gaze and inviting a question I hadn’t realised was already forming: What is your story?
And just like that—another interruption. This time by the light of what these carved poles reveal. For you see, they carry the history and hope of a people. They do not merely decorate the landscape; they speak it. And they are here, it seems, to both welcome and, if I’m curious (and humble) enough, enlighten me to their stories.
This, I believe, is how the light so often comes—not in dramatic shafts piercing storm clouds (though I never rule that out), but as a subtle glimmer cast by something waiting to be seen. A sudden recognition. A shift in perception. A well-timed birdcall. Or, in this case, a carved figure standing tall beside the water, beckoning not with words but with presence.
Light, you see, is a notorious meddler. It interrupts with unnerving regularity, often just when we’ve settled into the comforting murk of our own assumptions. It breaks in, mid-thought, like a cheeky child flinging open the curtains: “Look! Look at this!” And if we’re paying attention—or at least too startled to resist—we do.
Such interruptions are not limited to sunrises or carvings, of course. They happen when someone says just the thing you needed to hear, without knowing they’ve said anything at all. They happen in the warm glance of a stranger, the sudden recollection of a dream, or the golden spill of light through stained glass onto tired floorboards.
These moments, if we let them, reorient us. Not violently, but gently—like a hand on the shoulder turning us toward something more real than what we’d been staring at. They remind us that illumination is not simply about clarity—it is about connection. The kind of seeing that brings us into deeper relationship with the world, with one another, and with the shimmering mystery that holds us all.
Tomorrow, we’ll wander into the quieter but no less sacred terrain of “The Sacrament of Smallness”—where transcendence wears miniature robes and tends to show up disguised as moss, crumbs, and ordinary kindness.
But for now, may you be interrupted. Not rudely, of course—but radiantly. May some shaft of meaning cut through your day, however modest, and remind you: there is more here than you knew.
